Live Within Contradictions: Ernest Callenbach’s Last Message

Editor's note: This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death on April 16, and published by TomDispatch.

To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of
a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony
and mutual support—a world of sustainability, stability, and
confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in
Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down
a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will
soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used
during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at
the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones.
So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes
that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or
more of exceedingly difficult times.

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of
humans' political ability to act on commonsense, shared values.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends,
our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of
changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own
mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even
though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On
personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but
also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope

Children exude hope, even under the most
terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get
worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score
better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents
produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope
is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty
slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together—whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged
buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or
inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are
“persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face.
But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in
resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our
biggest resource of all.

Mutual support

The people who do best at basic
survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are
cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common
good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people
surprise us by their sacrifices—of food, of shelter, even sometimes
of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars,
or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources
fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up
dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help
each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than
competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the
communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

Practical skills

With the movement into cities of
the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have
had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a
boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or
construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes
together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when
some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home
ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked,
but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things—impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still
reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles,
quilts, tents, storage boxes.

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of
life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay
them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and
sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely,
and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear
from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each
other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from
at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

Organize

Much of the American ideology, our shared
and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to
imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in
violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer,
underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have
sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our
dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars,
armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude
about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of
course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual
support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly
arrived at and approved by the populace.

If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary
control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its
own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to
reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how
to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in
public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally
noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t
produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as
groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But
like any group process, this must be protected from domination by
powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group
recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking
together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.

Learn to live with contradictions.

These are dark
times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less
habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers:
“Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are
turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out
innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might
be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our
wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb
them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military
budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other
proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous
global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and
outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that
democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better
than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone,
especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and
cooperative.

The people who do best at basic
survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are
cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common
good.

We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark
times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration
will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate,
disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning
plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old
institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new
experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and
share new and better ways to survive together.

It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling
surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of
organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies,
nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture
solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact,
congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use,
low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A
vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.

Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though
devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of
what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has
fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent
on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that
carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot
class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market
pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no
matter the social or national consequences —which means moving capital
and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx
darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of
globalization his meaning has come clear.

The
looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge,
technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise:
highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through
“productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from
domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that
the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the
economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.”
When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut
back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to
shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless,
and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico,
where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of
desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual
future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such
societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military
control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all
kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its
worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative
equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain
fairly democratic.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule
unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third
World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated,
ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social
Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the
elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent—petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and
spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important
government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed
to invent outrageous events.

We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet.
Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable
ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the
overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of
understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule
history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook
history.

At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of
American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in
Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans
subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the
world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived. Millions
had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were
mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to
build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars,
skyscrapers.

Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built
the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the
war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of
unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a
sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge
working middle class evolved -- tens of millions of people could afford
(on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college.
This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took
a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding
rightward.

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as
a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things
gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make
even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to
subsidize them—the system should have been called Subsidism, not
Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or
the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in
maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that,
by capturing the government through the election finance system and
removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system
into a giant casino.

Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was
helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We
had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came
to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our
media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and
endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our
medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something
like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one
third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and
militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status
and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still
further back.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune
through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the
tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we
possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In
the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the
intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to
another positive era.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their
civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and
incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of
the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter
class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic
red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively
progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.

Ecotopia is a novel, and secession was its dominant
metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save
itself ecologically if it was on its own? As Ecotopia Emerging puts
it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so
it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines
of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.

The "ecology in one country" argument was an echo of an actual early
Soviet argument, as to whether "socialism in one country" was possible.
In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now
fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment,
agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer
capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the
dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like
rafters first entering the "tongue" of a great rapid, we are already
embarked on it.

When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of
empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody
dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new
institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.

So I look to a long-term process of "succession," as the biological
concept has it, where "disturbances" kill off an ecosystem, but little
by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for
larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on
them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient,
complex state—not necessarily what was there before, but durable and
richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over
the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved
locally. Technically, socially, economically—since it is quite true,
as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and
you can never just do one thing by itself.

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of
humans' political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era
has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on
every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by
looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games
become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers.
We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our
will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of
permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in
periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice
for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new
forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely
fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much
unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi—the old, the worn, the
tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something
else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when
strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards
overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let
us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or
unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural
contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for
it is the source of all new life and growth.

Interested?

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Gar Alperovitz: Why transformative change to the economic system is needed—and how it might be accomplished.

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Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novel Ecotopia among other works, founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly. He died at 83 on April 16th, leaving behind this document on his computer. This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.